Love in the Time of Cholera (15 page)

The rest of the day was like a hallucination:
she was in the same house where she had been until yesterday, receiving the same visitors who had said goodbye to her, talking about the same things, bewildered by the impression that she was reliving a piece of life she had already lived. It was such a faithful repetition that Fermina Daza trembled at the thought that the schooner trip would be a repetition, too, for the mere memory of it terrified
her. However, the only other possible means of returning home was two weeks on muleback over the mountains in circumstances even more dangerous than the first time, since a new civil war that had begun in the Andean state of Cauca was spreading throughout the Caribbean provinces. And so at eight o’clock that night she was once again accompanied to the port by the same troop of noisy relatives shedding
the same tears of farewell and with the same jumble of last-minute gifts and packages that did not fit in the cabins. When it was time to sail, the men in the family saluted the schooner with a volley of shots fired into the air, and Lorenzo Daza responded from the deck with five shots from his revolver. Fermina Daza’s fears dissipated because the wind was favorable all night, and there was
a scent of flowers at sea that helped her to sleep soundly without the safety straps. She dreamed that she was seeing Florentino Ariza again, and that he took off the face that she had always seen on him because in fact it was a mask, but his real face was identical to the false one. She got up very early, intrigued by the enigma of the dream, and she found her father drinking mountain coffee with
brandy in the captain’s bar, his eye twisted by alcohol, but he did not show the slightest hint of uncertainty regarding their return.

They were coming into port. The schooner slipped in silence through the labyrinth of sailing ships anchored in the cove of the
public market whose stench could be smelled several leagues out to sea, and the dawn was saturated by a steady drizzle that soon broke
into a full-fledged downpour. Standing watch on the balcony of the telegraph office, Florentino Ariza recognized the schooner, its sails disheartened by the rain, as it crossed Las Ánimas Bay and anchored at the market pier. The morning before, he had waited until eleven o’clock, when he learned through a casual telegram of the contrary winds that had delayed the schooner, and on this day he had
returned to his vigil at four o’clock in the morning. He continued to wait, not taking his eyes off the launch that carried ashore the few passengers who had decided to disembark despite the storm. Halfway across, the launch ran aground, and most of them had to abandon ship and splash through the mud to the pier. At eight o’clock, after they had waited in vain for the rain to stop, a black stevedore
in water up to his waist received Fermina Daza at the rail of the schooner and carried her ashore in his arms, but she was so drenched that Florentino Ariza did not recognize her.

She herself was not aware of how much she had matured during the trip until she walked into her closed house and at once undertook the heroic task of making it livable again with the help of Gala Placidia, the black
servant who came back from her old slave quarters as soon as she was told of their return. Fermina Daza was no longer the only child, both spoiled and tyrannized by her father, but the lady and mistress of an empire of dust and cobwebs that could be saved only by the strength of invincible love. She was not intimidated because she felt herself inspired by an exalted courage that would have enabled
her to move the world. The very night of their return, while they were having hot chocolate and crullers at the large kitchen table, her father delegated to her the authority to run the house, and he did so with as much formality as if it were a sacred rite.

“I turn over to you the keys to your life,” he said.

She, with all of her seventeen years behind her, accepted with a firm hand, conscious
that every inch of liberty she won was for the sake of love. The next day, after a night of bad dreams, she suffered her first sense of displeasure at being home when she opened the balcony window and saw again the sad drizzle in the little park, the statue of the decapitated hero, the marble bench where Florentino Ariza used to sit with his book of verses. She no longer thought of
him as the
impossible sweetheart but as the certain husband to whom she belonged heart and soul. She felt the heavy weight of the time they had lost while she was away, she felt how hard it was to be alive and how much love she was going to need to love her man as God demanded. She was surprised that he was not in the little park, as he had been so many times despite the rain, and that she had received no sign
of any kind from him, not even a premonition, and she was shaken by the sudden idea that he had died. But she put aside the evil thought at once, for in the recent frenzy of telegrams regarding her imminent return they had forgotten to agree on a way to continue communicating once she was home.

The truth is that Florentino Ariza was sure she had not returned, until the telegraph operator in Riohacha
confirmed that they had embarked on Friday aboard the very same schooner that did not arrive the day before because of contrary winds, so that during the weekend he watched for any sign of life in her house, and at dusk on Monday he saw through the windows a light that moved through the house and was extinguished, a little after nine, in the bedroom with the balcony. He did not sleep, victim
to the same fearful nausea that had disturbed his first nights of love. Tránsito Ariza arose with the first roosters, alarmed that her son had gone out to the patio at midnight and had not yet come back inside, and she did not find him in the house. He had gone to wander along the jetties, reciting love poetry into the wind and crying with joy until daybreak. At eight o’clock he was sitting under
the arches of the Parish Café, delirious with fatigue, trying to think of how to send his welcome to Fermina Daza, when he felt himself shaken by a seismic tremor that tore his heart.

It was she, crossing the Plaza of the Cathedral, accompanied by Gala Placidia who was carrying the baskets for their marketing, and for the first time she was not wearing her school uniform. She was taller than
when she had left, more polished and intense, her beauty purified by the restraint of maturity. Her braid had grown in, but instead of letting it hang down her back she wore it twisted over her left shoulder, and that simple change had erased all girlish traces from her. Florentino Ariza sat bedazzled until the child of his vision had crossed the plaza, looking to neither the left nor the right. But
then the same irresistible power that had paralyzed him obliged him
to hurry after her when she turned the corner of the Cathedral and was lost in the deafening noise of the market’s rough cobblestones.

He followed her without letting himself be seen, watching the ordinary gestures, the grace, the premature maturity of the being he loved most in the world and whom he was seeing for the first
time in her natural state. He was amazed by the fluidity with which she made her way through the crowd. While Gala Placidia bumped into people and became entangled in her baskets and had to run to keep up with her, she navigated the disorder of the street in her own time and space, not colliding with anyone, like a bat in the darkness. She had often been to the market with her Aunt Escolástica, but
they made only minor purchases, since her father himself took charge of provisioning the household, not only with furniture and food but even with women’s clothing. So this first excursion was for her a fascinating adventure idealized in her girlhood dreams.

She paid no attention to the urgings of the snake charmers who offered her a syrup for eternal love, or to the pleas of the beggars lying
in doorways with their running sores, or to the false Indian who tried to sell her a trained alligator. She made a long and detailed tour with no planned itinerary, stopping with no other motive than her unhurried delight in the spirit of things. She entered every doorway where there was something for sale, and everywhere she found something that increased her desire to live. She relished the aroma
of vetiver in the cloth in the great chests, she wrapped herself in embossed silks, she laughed at her own laughter when she saw herself in the full-length mirror in The Golden Wire disguised as a woman from Madrid, with a comb in her hair and a fan painted with flowers. In the store that sold imported foods she lifted the lid of a barrel of pickled herring that reminded her of nights in the northeast
when she was a very little girl in San Juan de la Ciénaga. She sampled an Alicante sausage that tasted of licorice, and she bought two for Saturday’s breakfast, as well as some slices of cod and a jar of red currants in aguardiente. In the spice shop she crushed leaves of sage and oregano in the palms of her hands for the pure pleasure of smelling them, and bought a handful of cloves, another
of star anise, and one each of ginger root and juniper, and she walked away with tears of laughter in her eyes because the smell of the cayenne pepper made her sneeze so much. In the French cosmetics shop, as she was
buying Reuter soaps and balsam water, they put a touch of the latest perfume from Paris behind her ear and gave her a breath tablet to use after smoking.

She played at buying, it
is true, but what she really needed she bought without hesitation, with an authority that allowed no one to think that she was doing so for the first time, for she was conscious that she was buying not only for herself but for him as well: twelve yards of linen for their table, percale for the marriage sheets that by dawn would be damp with moisture from both their bodies, the most exquisite of everything
for both of them to enjoy in the house of love. She asked for discounts and she got them, she argued with grace and dignity until she obtained the best, and she paid with pieces of gold that the shopkeepers tested for the sheer pleasure of hearing them sing against the marble counters.

Florentino Ariza spied on her in astonishment, he pursued her breathlessly, he tripped several times over the
baskets of the maid who responded to his excuses with a smile, and she passed so close to him that he could smell her scent, and if she did not see him then it was not because she could not but because of the haughty manner in which she walked. To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking
of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell. Nevertheless,
when she entered the riotous noise of the Arcade of the Scribes, he realized that he might lose the moment he had craved for so many years.

Fermina Daza shared with her schoolmates the singular idea that the Arcade of the Scribes was a place of perdition that was forbidden, of course, to decent young ladies. It was an arcaded gallery across from a little plaza where carriages and freight carts
drawn by donkeys were for hire, where popular commerce became noisier and more dense. The name dated from colonial times, when the taciturn scribes in their vests and false cuffs first began to sit there,
waiting for a poor man’s fee to write all kinds of documents: memoranda of complaints or petition, legal testimony, cards of congratulation or condolence, love letters appropriate to any stage
in an affair. They, of course, were not the ones who had given that thundering market its bad reputation but more recent peddlers who made illegal sales of all kinds of questionable merchandise smuggled in on European ships, from obscene postcards and aphrodisiac ointments to the famous Catalonian condoms with iguana crests that fluttered when circumstances required or with flowers at the tip that
would open their petals at the will of the user. Fermina Daza, somewhat unskilled in the customs of the street, went through the Arcade without noticing where she was going as she searched for a shady refuge from the fierce eleven o’clock sun.

She sank into the hot clamor of the shoeshine boys and the bird sellers, the hawkers of cheap books and the witch doctors and the sellers of sweets who
shouted over the din of the crowd: pineapple sweets for your sweetie, coconut candy is dandy, brown-sugar loaf for your sugar. But, indifferent to the uproar, she was captivated on the spot by a paper seller who was demonstrating magic inks, red inks with an ambience of blood, inks of sad aspect for messages of condolence, phosphorescent inks for reading in the dark, invisible inks that revealed
themselves in the light. She wanted all of them so she could amuse Florentino Ariza and astound him with her wit, but after several trials she decided on a bottle of gold ink. Then she went to the candy sellers sitting behind their big round jars and she bought six of each kind, pointing at the glass because she could not make herself heard over all the shouting: six angel hair, six tinned milk, six
sesame seed bars, six cassava pastries, six chocolate bars, six blancmanges, six tidbits of the queen, six of this and six of that, six of everything, and she tossed them into the maid’s baskets with an irresistible grace and a complete detachment from the stormclouds of flies on the syrup, from the continual hullabaloo and the vapor of rancid sweat that reverberated in the deadly heat. She was
awakened from the spell by a good-natured black woman with a colored cloth around her head who was round and handsome and offered her a triangle of pineapple speared on the tip of a butcher’s knife. She took it, she put it whole into her mouth, she tasted it, and was
chewing it as her eyes wandered over the crowd, when a sudden shock rooted her on the spot. Behind her, so close to her ear that
only she could hear it in the tumult, she heard his voice:

“This is not the place for a crowned goddess.”

She turned her head and saw, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, those other glacial eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified with fear, just as she had seen them in the crowd at Midnight Mass the first time he was so close to her, but now, instead of the commotion of love, she felt the abyss
of disenchantment. In an instant the magnitude of her own mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity. She just managed to think: My God, poor man! Florentino Ariza smiled, tried to say something, tried to follow her, but she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand.